struggling with the world 133artifacts, which we can reimagine and remake. However, it compro-
mised this revolutionary insight by embracing a series of necessitarian
superstitions: the ideas that there is a closed list of indivisible institu-
tional systems, realized successively in the course of history (with the
result that the horizon of the possible in the alternative ways of or ga-
niz ing society has been forever set); that each of these institutional or-
ders amounts to an indivisible system (with the result that all politics
must represent either the ameliorative reform of one of these systems or
its revolutionary substitution); and that inexorable laws of historical
change drive forward the succession of systems (with the result that
history makes the programmatic imagination superfl uous).
Th ese superstitions of false necessity prevented the thesis of the
artifact- like character of social order from ever being carried to its
radical and true conclusion: the awareness that the whole order of soci-
ety is frozen politics— a temporary containment of struggle over the
terms of social life.
Th e positive social sciences have rejected these strong claims of false
necessity only because they have also abandoned the contrast— central
to classical social theory— between the surface and the depth of social
life, between the formative structures and the formed routines. Th ey
have consequently renounced as well the attempt to understand struc-
tural discontinuity in the history of society and culture. Argument about
alternative orderings of social life is thus left without a basis in the ex-
planation of experience; the vital link between insight into the actual
and imagination of the adjacent possible is severed. A patina of natu-
ralness and necessity descends upon social life. Th e would- be science of
society becomes complicit in helping uphold the dictatorship of no
alternatives.
Th e normative discourses of po liti cal philosophy and legal theory do
nothing to correct this abasement of the intellect. Th ey supply theoreti-
cal props for practices designed to humanize or to improve the last ma-
jor institutional and ideological settlement in the rich North Atlantic
societies: compensatory redistribution by tax and transfer and idealiza-
tion of law in the vocabulary of impersonal policy and principle. Th e
humanities become the terrain for adventures in subjective experience
disconnected from the reor ga ni za tion and the reimagining of society.
Th ey teach us to sing in our chains.